RASPBERRY FOUNDATION CHIEF Eben Upton has been awarded a Royal Society of Engineering Silver Medal.

The Society's Silver Medals are given out to people who are less than 22 years in the business, and have been awarded since 1994.

Winners are commended for their "Outstanding and demonstrated personal contribution to British engineering, which is resulting in successful market exploitation, by an engineer with less than 22 years in full time employment or equivalent on 1 January in year of award and who will normally be Chartered," explains the society.

Last year's winner was Suranga Chandratillake, CEO of Blinkx, while others have included Steve Furber, professor of computer engineering at the School of Computer Science at the University of Manchester, Andy Hopper, professor of communication engineering at Cambridge University, and Mandy Chessell, a Websphere architect at IBM.

The Society hasn't updated its webpage to reflect where this year's awards are going, but we can say that one is heading for Upton's chest.

A short blog post from the Raspberry Pi Foundation welcomed the gong, while Upton told The INQUIRER that he is proud to have got the nod.

"It's obviously an amazing and surprising honour, particularly when you see some of the people who've won it in previous years," he said.

"We never saw Raspberry Pi going to this sort of scale, or reaching the sorts of people it's reaching, and this is a great way to round off a very unusual couple of years."

The Raspberry Pi is a sub £30 computer that is around the size of a credit card. It has sold over one million units since it was released. µ